On Living, Leading, (Re)designing, and Coaching

What wakes us up?

As a coach I sometimes invite my clients to take up the practice of creating a never-ending list. Here is the start of a never-ending list of what wakes us up from the haze of unconsciousness to ourselves, others, and our life that we often live in:

• An unexpected confusion
• A sudden awareness of death
• An embarrassing humiliation
• Failure to meet a commitment
• A surprise
• A lover's rejection
• A parent's rejection
• A loss of employment
• A loss of opportunity
• An unresolved conflict
• A job left incomplete
• Seeing the whole
• Seeing the foreground and the background
• A poem
• A song
• A love letter
• A play
• A movie
• A musical
• A distinction
• A lover
• Vigorous exercise
• Just sitting
• Feeling our emotions fully
• Sensing our body fully
• Experiencing our experience fully
• ...

What else wakes us up?

When we wake up ... what do we awake to?

With love,

-Steve

Designing behavior

In my recent series of posts on design, I reviewed an article on transformation design. One of the openings explored by this article is that the practice of design is on the cusp of a major shift - from design as design of things to design as design of behaviors.

If the practice of design is going to make this shift, then
designers need to have interpretations of how behavior
is generated that enable them to shift behaviors.

One prevalent interpretation of how behavior is generated is that we act in ways to avoid pain and experience pleasure. This is the interpretation proposed by behavioral psychologists B. F. Skinner and J. B. Watson. James Flaherty calls this the "amoeba theory" of behavior referring to an amoeba's tendency to move away from sharp pins and toward sugar as discovered with a microscope.

For sure, there is some truth to the behavioral model of action. After all, most of us don't touch hot stove burners for enjoyment and fun. However, there are many times in life when we purposely act in a way that we know will generate pain. For example, childbirth, marathons, triathlons, war, etc. So the source of human behavior must be more complex than this "pleasure principle" theory can explain.

Another interpretation is that human being are rational desiring beings that act to satisfy their desires. Going back to Descartes and the Enlightenment, we've taken ourselves to be rational beings that operate by reason and desire. From this viewpoint, we use our reason to analyze our feelings into desires and then we use our rationality to invent ways to satisfy our desires through our behavior.

Just as with the pleasure principle theory, the rational theory of behavior is certainly at least partly true. We feel the pangs of hunger, declare ourselves hungry and desiring food, and find some food to eat (like this easy to desire cake to the left). This interpretation of human behavior has given rise to our approaches to marketing and sales. For decades now, marketers and sales people have understood their job as the manufacturing of new desires which their products will satisfy.

However, the rational interpretation is a rather impoverished and mechanistic view of human beings and the lives we live. Are we really only machines for desiring and satisfying our desires? Is that enough to make human life worth living? Is that what makes our work worth doing – satisfying our desires?

The failure of most New Year's resolutions is all the evidence we need that the rational interpretation is also incomplete and inadequate. If only our behavior were completely rational, then no one would have difficulty making the changes in their life. And yet many people find this very very hard to do.

Do we only ever act to satisfy our desires
or do we sometimes act to
generate something else?

So far we've looked at two interpretations of human behavior: the pleasure principle and rationality. How well do either of these interpretations help designers generate new behaviors?

More in the next post ...

Take care,

-Steve

"Empathic Economy" is a step toward Integral Design

In one of yesterday's posts, I explored the relationship between breakdowns and thoughtless acts, as distinguished by Jane Fulton Suri, Chief Creative Officer of the design consultancy IDEO. As it happens, Jane Fulton Suri was featured in an interview on the blog Creative Generalist yesterday.

In the interview, she points out that it is common within progressive design companies to use "observation, intuition, empathy and imagination about customers/end-users/consumers" to inspire innovation. However, she suggest taking this a step further.

"When I refer to 'the empathic economy' I’m talking about a future possibility - about a huge opportunity for innovation in which a similar level of empathy and imagination might be applied to the many different kinds of people who populate the business ecology of a particular industry, not just customers/end-users/consumers."

This is a move away from traditionally user-centric design toward integral design.

Here are some of my current speculations about integral design:

1. Integral designs are not only designs of things but of selves, systems, relationships, cultures, behaviors, experiences, and futures simultaneously.
2. Integral design doesn't favor only the direct end user of the design. Instead, integral design takes into account the designing effect on the whole ecology that a design will have over its lifetime.
3. Integral designs emerge within and by participation across the whole ecology. There is no central designer or locus of design control.
4. Integral design requires a new understanding and practice of leadership.
5. Integral design requires a rethinking of the concepts of waste and the declaration of new wastes.
6. Integral designs are inherently sustainable through being adaptive and responsive to change.
7. Integral designs build capacity not dependency.
8. Integral designs are natural designs. The best place to study integral design is in nature.
9. Integral designs are centering while also being transforming.
10. Integral designs when encountered, interacted with, and used confront us with our own freedom and humanity. In a way ... they wake us up to ourselves and our lives.

Each of these will be explored in future posts.

For now, I'm curious what others think of the notion of Integral Design. Any good examples? What are the challenges for generating more integral designs?

Take care,

-Steve

Distinguishing Integral Coaching

I am sometimes asked by clients and other coaches to compare Integral Coaching, the methodology that I use, to other coaching methodologies. So I created this diagram as one way to illustrate the distinction between approaches.

Integral Coaching is an approach to coaching that works with the whole person - body, mind, soul, and spirit - across self, culture, and nature.

The diagram maps several coaching methodologies - behavioral coaching, somatic coaching, constructive-developmental coaching, ontological coaching, and organizational coaching - onto Ken Wilber's integral model to show the quadrants that they recognize and favor in their approach.

The basic observation about non-integral approaches is that their quadrant favoritism limits their effectiveness because any change in practices in a quadrant will be undermined by established but unchanged resonant practices in the other quadrants.

A classic example of the limits of quadrant-exclusive (non-integral) approaches are New Year's resolutions. When we make a resolution (an individual interior approach) it is usually undermined by our habits which are embodied (individual exterior quadrant) and reinforced by our network of friends (collective interior quadrant) and our physical spaces (collective exterior quadrant).

In order to change our behavior, we have to change resonant practices in all four quadrants simultaneously by adding new body practices, changing our network of friends and how we interact with them, and changing our physical space.

When we engage all four quadrants change is easier
to make, complete, and integrate into our lives.

Integral Coaching is the methodology created by James Flaherty and taught through and ICF-accredited coach training program at New Ventures West. In the interest of full disclosure, I must also say that I am on the faculty of this school.

Take care,

-Steve

Breakdowns are openings for new thoughtless acts

I just received the book thoughtless acts?: observations on intuitive design by Jane Fulton Suri of IDEO.  This is a small book of mostly pictures of - you guessed it - thoughtless acts. According to her,

"Thoughtless acts are all those intuitive ways we adapt, exploit, and react to things in our environment; things we do without really thinking."

Thoughtless acts are simply the way we cope with our world. Just imagine if coping with the simplest thing like walking across the room took thought? We'd never get anything done.

Thoughtless acts are not careless acts. Thoughtless acts are acts we do to take care of our concerns and ourselves. Take as an example this mail carrier resting his legs.

Until we die (and who knows, maybe beyond), our life is a never-ending string of thoughtless acts ... except when we have a breakdown. In the occurrence of a breakdown, our acts are no longer thoughtless. As we've explored before, breakdowns open the space for new designs. And new designs are openings to new thoughtless acts once they are embodied.

As leaders, designers, and coaches, the study of thoughtless acts is a study in how and how well we cope with breakdowns. In Fulton Suri's book, she present various kinds of thoughtless acts - reacting, responding, co-opting, exploiting, adapting, conforming, and signaling.

The picture above comes from IDEO's Thoughtless Acts flickr pool. Fulton Suri reminds us that there is no definitive interpretations of these thoughtless acts. The value is in what you see. So, what do you see?

What do thoughtless acts reveal about our way of being?

Have fun with it!

-Steve

Design consulting is the new management consulting

Over the past few days I've been reading a white paper called Transformation Design produced by The Design Council's RED unit. This paper was originally published last February on their RED blog but I just recently discovered it. From their blurb ... "RED is a 'do tank' that develops new thinking and practice on social and economic problems through design-led innovation."

What attracted me to their work is that they think the practice of design is on the cusp of a major shift, "one that represents a step change in scope, approach, and impact" according to their paper. And they name this step change in design approach "Transformation Design." They offer these possibilities for transformation design.

"A new design discipline is emerging. It builds on traditional design skills to address social and economic issues. It uses the design process as a means to enable a wide range of disciplines and stakeholders to collaborate. It develops solutions that are practical and desirable. It is an approach that places the individual at the heart of new solutions, and builds the capacity to innovate into organizations and institutions."

They make the point that traditionally organizations have been designed to cope with a complicated rather than a complex world. A complicated world requires hierarchical control structures which break down problems into less complicated and more manageable problems.

However, they suggest, that we don't so much live in a complicated world as a complex world. Problems like addressing climate change aren't complicated and bendable to the will of hierarchical control. Addressing climate change requires many people and many organizations around the world to change their behavior on many different levels. That makes addressing climate change a complex problem. And hierarchical models of organization (and design) aren't well-suited to addressing such complexity. In fact, they hamper addressing complexity.

The Red unit suggests that "even organizations could be design objects." And this is the fulcrum around which the new design discipline is emerging - design is not simply design of things, it is design of behaviors (dare I say ways of being).

They name as tenets of this new design approach the following:

1. Defining and redefining the brief - participating with the client to declare the design problem instead of taking the client's design brief as the declaration of the problem
2. Collaborating between disciplines - complex problems cannot be addressed from a single point of view
3. Employing participatory design practices - solutions must emerge from those intended to deliver and use them
4. Building capacity, not dependency - because 'design is never done,' build the capacity to continue adapting and designing
5. Designing beyond traditional solutions - design must move beyond designing things and into designing behaviors and experiences
6. Creating fundamental change - create systemic change on a national scale to address shared social and economic concerns

The design community is waking up to the larger role and impact of design in shaping our lives as human beings. And this requires designers to work in a new and different way.

And the parallels of transformation design to leading, designing, and coaching as I've been exploring them in this blog are many. It seems to me that RED has declared a breakdown in the current practice of design to meet the complexity of today's problems. And, while they don't use this language, they have discovered that the most important designing is ontological designing - designing ways of being.

As I was reading this article I realized that design consulting is the new management consulting.

Take care,

-Steve

What is a breakdown?

In yesterday's post I talked about how breakdowns are openings for new designs. But I didn't really talk about what breakdowns are. Breakdown is a key concept for leaders, designers, and coaches, so let's spend a little more space exploring it.

Breakdown is a term borrowed from the German philosopher Martin Heidegger who studied and wrote about what is most ordinary and everyday in our human lives. In fact, what he studied was so "ordinary everyday" that for the most part what he studied is invisible to us. In some sense, his life's project was to make visible to us what it is that makes us human beings. And breakdowns are one of these ordinary everyday occurrences that reveal our humanness.

Cognitively, a breakdowns appears to us as an moment where - unexpectedly - what to do next in order to accomplish our task is no longer obvious and transparent to us. When we're in breakdown we are stuck.

Somatically (in our bodies), being in breakdown can feel unsettling and even shocking. It can also summon or increase the flow of energy.

Emotionally, being thrown into breakdown can give rise to anger, sadness, and even shame. And breakdowns can shift our mood to one of confusion, frustration, resignation, guilt, despair, depression, and even panic.

Breakdowns are also opportunities for our inner critics (superegos) to attack us with negative self-assessments like "You never get it right!" or "You idiot!" or even more colorful criticisms. But experiencing breakdowns doesn't mean there is something wrong with you - it means you are encountering something new about yourself and life.

Linguistically, a breakdown is a declaration that we make to ourselves and others that we are stuck.

Breakdowns in and of themselves aren't necessarily a bad thing. After all, life is mysterious and the mystery presents us with breakdown after breakdown. What matters in life is not that you manage to avoid breakdowns - an impossibility - but instead how you cope with the breakdowns that you are thrown into.

"Life is full of breakdowns, and mastery of living
is mastery in dealing with breakdowns." - Alan Sieler

Mastery in dealing with breakdowns starts with the recognition that declaring yourself in breakdown is a powerful and empowering move (quite the opposite of what we usually assume). The power of this move is that it creates an opening for learning and designing something new.

If, on the other hand, we deny being in breakdown to ourselves or others, we close ourselves off to learning and designing something new. We create a closing instead of an opening. And this produces entrenchment rather than evolution in our current way of being and living. One of the more visible and significant examples of this today is the Bush administration's refusal to declare they are in breakdown in Iraq and the entrenchment in current policy that they are buried in.

Declaring a breakdown is a powerful move for any leader. It opens the space for new designs, new practices, new ways of being and living. And with these changes come new results. And leadership is about creating new approaches and new results in the face of approaches that aren't working.

World Usability Day

Yesterday was World Usability Day 2006.

Here is a conference - a global gathering if you will - of people concerned with the way that design on-goingly shapes our world and the actions that are both possible and not possible within them.

When we see pictures like this, it is easy to see how the design of longer matches anticipates the breakdown of burned fingers, and enables us to cope skillfully. A nice illustration of what I was talking about in the previous post.

We design our world while our world designs us

I started this blog to explore the relationships between leading, designing, and coaching and how they all play a central role in our lives. I've started to explore the question of leadership with the series on the three big breakdowns every leader must face. Now, I'd like to begin weaving the question of design into this exploration.

Like the question 'what is leadership?' the question 'what is design?' is worth a lifetime of inquiry. Some design philosophers have even suggested that no agreement about the nature of design is really possible because design is configured and reconfigured again and again in so many different applications.

There is not a single thing around us - desks, cups, computers, keyboards, mice, doors, rooms, houses, schools, businesses, roads, cars, cities, airplanes, nations, etc. - that is not designed. Design is everywhere in the made world and yet it is so often concealed from our awareness because it is doing its job. When designs work, life works. And when life works, we don't really notice that designing is working.

And then we also have moments where life isn't working for us - where our designs aren't working. We call these moments breakdowns (a term we borrow from Heidegger). Breakdowns aren't necessarily a bad thing, although they can be bummer when they happen. Instead, their value is that breakdowns reveal to us where we need a design in order to get something or some part of our life to work.

Design is a practice whose purpose is to anticipate breakdowns and enable us to cope with them skillfully, effectively, and efficiently. Design is an action that happens in the present for the sake of generating a future that works.

Evey intentional act is an act of design. Every time we act with concern for our future, we are designing. The choices we make regarding decorating, dress, food, drink, homes, education, politics, business practices, and so many others reveal that we are designers. Design is fundamental to our way of life. We are all designers (but don't tell those people who think that design is a profession).

Tony Fry, one of my favorite design philosophers points to three aspects of design that must be considered.

1. the designed object that results from the designed act or process
2. the designer (or designing tool)
3. the design process that is the on-going designing of the designed object as it functions or dysfunctions

Each of these are worth careful consideration. Personally, I am most drawn to consider the third - the design process, as Fry calls it.  I don't like this naming because it is too easily confused with the process through which the design arises. Instead, I call this - somewhat awkwardly - "the designed as process." That is to say that a design acts in the midst of relationships to design the actions that are possible within those relationships.

For example, the presence of a cup with a handle designs our manner of drinking - how much we can drink before refilling, how we hold the cup, how hot the liquid can be so that we can still hold the cup, etc. That is to say that designs - a cup with a handle - also design their use. We design our world while our world designs us.

Perhaps this is what was so radical about Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup can as art. Warhol took a design and situated it in a totally different context - art - and in doing so, revealed our taken-for-granted and therefore previously invisible relationship with it. He changed its designing of us.

The major social crises we face today - global warming, economic instability, political deadlock, health care, etc. are all products of design. The major crises in our lives - work-life balance, unfulfiling relationships,  feelings of victimization, and meaninglessness are also products of design.

Design is a practice that is fundamental to both leading and coaching because it is essential to living - to our very being. We'll pick up this thread in another post.

Take care,

-Steve

Diving into a sea of unknown

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always -
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything) ...

- T. S. Eliot (from "Four Quartets")

Today I resigned from my full-time position working as a manager in a hi-tech company. And I have accepted a full-time job working a number of positions with a leading leadership coaching and coach training school.

And with this move, I'm diving into a sea of unknown. Much of what I could reasonably assume about my future is now obsolete. A whole range of possibilities that were open to me have closed. And with that a whole new set of possibilities have - in an instant - opened for me.

I feel a strong and persistent call beckoning me to step into this sea in spite of the fear the unknown brings with it for me. And what is most amazing is that this unknown sea is alive and enlivening to me. And for some reason - this time - I don't feel ungrounded. Instead, I feel grounded by the sense that this sea is where I belong, is where I am, and where I will know myself.

What is your sea of unknown? What stops you from diving in? Is it real?

Love,

-Steve